The community has experienced increasing inactivity through the years. With factors like deviantart being a more hostile and unwelcoming place (somewhere to post art) to time constraints, there's just not a lot of draw to the community.

I would consider the community near-dead. Though Fractalforums.com was a huge success, many people I've talked to consider Fractalforums.org to be more or less an empty desert. Most people are intrigued by the artistic appeal and mathematical amazements fractals present, but it's becoming increasingly uncommon to see one become active in the community.

Still, this doesn't mean that we can't try. The Fractal Foundation is one of the driving forces behind this, along with the Fractal Institute. Both are trying to increase awareness about fractals and just how amazing they are. "See these pictures?" a fractal enthusiast might say, "You can make these on your computer at home!" Hopefully, these efforts will help revitalize the community in some way -- but until then, we can consider the community to be largely stagnant.

I think that the apparent lack of participation is, at least partly, due to the number of sites promoting fractals and fractal art, it became "trendy" to be "into" fractals and the novelty has worn off a bit, and (this is the big one) you actually need brains and a bit of talent to make good pictures, by that I mean: one must understand lighting, camera placement, color management, image composition plus an understanding of the math and functionality of the programs available to do this. imho it's all just too much for the average person who wants instant gratification. It takes some effort and ya gotta learn stuff, "but hey, I just want to click a few buttons and make cool art..."

you actually need brains and a bit of talent to make good pictures, by that I mean: one must understand lighting, camera placement, color management, image composition plus an understanding of the math and functionality of the programs available to do this. imho it's all just too much for the average person who wants instant gratification. It takes some effort and ya gotta learn stuff, "but hey, I just want to click a few buttons and make cool art..."

Agreed. It doesn't take much to get something half-decent, but the effort is key in all areas of art, including fractals. Not only that, but render time is an issue for some people too. (mostly because some people are like "bUT WhY cAn'T i HAvE 8K AnImaTIoNs?")

The reduction in numbers reflects the reduction of fractal artists using this site, as alternative sites are now available.Most of the people that are important to me in respect to learning about fractal maths and program development, are thankfully still here. (but i do miss Luca).

Those of us interested in the fractal maths and programming, has always been a very small number, and FF is still our home.

For me, FF.com died when it became yet another image spamming venue. It used to be a place where actual enthusiasts had actual discussions, and then much of it was drowned out by the incessant image spamming. I'm sure many people loved this aspect of FF, but well, in my opinion that was the tipping point.

On the other hand, the Fractal Chats Discord is going great, new people joining and having discussions etc.

I wouldn't say it's dead. We have a hard core of very active members, discussing highly specialiced topics, coming up with new ideas, techniques and formulas.The overall activity has declined a lot indeed since the heighdays some 10 years ago.

For me, FF.com died when it became yet another image spamming venue. It used to be a place where actual enthusiasts had actual discussions, and then much of it was drowned out by the incessant image spamming. I'm sure many people loved this aspect of FF, but well, in my opinion that was the tipping point.

I wish you had voiced that opinion louder back then. I fought a lonely battle with the same opinion on the team back then at ff.com

I always argued that especially the autocreation of new topics for each gallery upload spams the forum and makes it hardly usable for actual discussion about math, science and techniques, because those got lost and dropped out of view.

For presenting images there are much better places, deviant art, facebookgroups like mandelbulb maniacs(12000+ members)..

Imho we should stop trying to be the "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" (german: egg laying, wool and milk producing pig) and just stick to what forums are there for: discussion about a topic.

Now that Sockratease obviously won't come back, one of the strongest proponents to keep focus on images is gone. Maybe it's time to rethink our approach and get back to our roots.I wonder if anyone else thinks alike, that we should use the ongoing decline to rebalance and take the whole image section more out of the daily view.

Don't get me wrong, we should definitely keep the gallery! It's nice to have, and it actually offers everything the forum-threads offer. You can comment images and discuss them, you can rate them.. you can see the most recent images in a beautiful list.. It's perfect standalone, no need to spam the forum.

2 possible actions come to mind: -deactivating auto-topic creation for gallery uploads-stopping the image threads.(keepinf the image of the month contest, giving it much more worth. presenting your best image monthly vs "spamming")

The downside: once we do this, it will become rather silent and activity will drop even further.

I for one highly favour to re-focus on discussion about fractals rather than showing of images.What are your thoughts?

ps: just checked, 63 of the latest 100 posts were images. when going through the list I discovered 2 interesting discussion topics I've missed because they were burried and dropped out of view.

I am not a programer, but I like very much all discussion topics.I agree that theory and software's discussion is more important.Images are very good when comes along with some formulas, parameter or explanation. Many of the gallery's images doesnt bring even the software's name with it was done I know that have a similar topic, but I miss Announcements & News topic of the old forum.

Okok, you might call me one of the spammers since I love to post an image here regularly

BUT very early on when this FF came online, I already said (in other words): why on earth do we need an image AND a thread? This forum should be about discussing stuff and even without the image threads its an eierlegende Wollmilchsau or -eber since we have the maths-discussions of fractals and their applications, the port-a-formula-to-some-software-threads, the fractal-software-threads etc etc.

My idea: this should always predominantly be a theory-oriented forum. The Gallery is no problem as images 'explain' to some extent what's so cool about fractals to non-mathematicians, but away with the threads, says I When I click Unread Posts I do not want to see image threads but discussions.

And as long as it's possible to post to the gallery I do not see how we would lose a lot of people here. There's already a Gallery section below on the home page, that should be sufficient for people that are interested in it to find it.

are you fkn kidding me? where have you guys been hiding all the time!?!

I've been waiting for this since... well it was one of the main reason why I applied to become a moderator 4 years ago, but all my countless attempts were killed of.I had given up and accepted this fate.

but now:

ok, let's wait a day for some more reactions, giving the opponents a chance to make their point.. and then ignore them..

I wish you had voiced that opinion louder back then. I fought a lonely battle with the same opinion on the team back then at ff.com

If there's one thing I can't be accused of, it's not voicing my opinion loudly enough on FF Actually, I literally gave up many times (after god knows how many posts, and being one of the first users on the original forum) because it was simply pissing against the wind. I became known for that instead of the zillions of technical posts I made there; fantastic, mission accomomplished

So anyway, what did I do? Made my little fractal chat channel, and tried to make the change I wanted to see. That's sort of all you can do in that situation- if you think something is wrong and no one listens, either stop trying or go your own way, aka "vote with your feet". Obviously I still check here sometimes, but really it's such a pain going through Pauldebrot's spamming (see? not afraid at all to state my opinions ) and truly wild conspiracy theories when he can't post an image for a whole minute or three, ... why would anyone except a truly lifetime-invested fractal freak like me keep coming back?

I know this is all criticism and not constructive but, as others have agreed, the answer is kinda simple: separate out the image posts from the discussion posts, or the current situation with any real discussion getting drowned out will obviously continue.